Yale School of Drama graduate Meg Miroshnik has returned to New Haven for the Yale Repertory Theatre production of her play "The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls" which is being presented through Feb. 22.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Yale School of Drama graduate Meg Miroshnik has returned to New...

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Emily Walton rehearses a scene from "The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls" at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven through Feb. 22.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Emily Walton rehearses a scene from "The Fairytale Lives of Russian...

"It's completely surreal. I never expected to see my work here, especially this soon," Miroshnik said in an interview before a rehearsal last week.

"It was an amazing surprise to get the call from (artistic director) James Bundy. They do take a lot of chances."

"The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls" is set in Moscow in 2005 and combines realistic elements with genuine Russian fairy tales to take audiences inside the radical changes since the former Soviet Union disappeared in favor of capitalism three decades ago.

The writer had worked in Moscow as a freelancer. "I wanted to find a way to process that experience as a play."

Reading the script, it is hard to imagine how so many fairy tale fantasy elements -- including a sinister basket of potatoes and a possible witch or two -- can be brought to life on the New Haven stage by director Rachel Chavkin and her company of actors and designers.

Miroshnik laughed when I asked her if she thought about the staging practicality of her play as she wrote it.

"I just kind of let all of that go," she said of worrying about how her vision could be realized. "I focused on the joy of producing it.

"But then I realized it had so many (difficult) moments. The bear. The fighting potatoes. I had no idea how to execute all of that on the stage."

In this interview before the first public performance, Miroshnik said she expected to be surprised by some of the stagecraft when "Russian Girls" came to life at the Rep.

The writer feels lucky to have a second full production so soon after the Atlanta premiere. It has given her time and space to refine the script and has allowed Chavkin to bring new staging ideas to the play.

"The first time you produce a play, it can feel like you're rushing around putting out fires," Miroshnik said, chuckling, of the first transition from page to stage. "It was so great to get that production, but you reach a point where you just run out of time."

The Yale Rep production is "radically different" in one major way. Chavkin has introduced musical backing in the form of a live rock band.

"We have an all-female punk band on the stage, which Rachel says is a combination of Pussy Riot and the Spice Girls. ... It will be a completely different experience," she said.

"It's another character in the play," the writer added of the band. "They bring something new and exciting to it."

Things have been changing so rapidly in Russia that Miroshnik set her play quite specifically in 2005 because the same stories might play out very differently now.

"Some of the play is about the ways that the country felt foreign though familiar to me," Miroshnik said of the huge impact of American and Hollywood pop culture and fashion on a country that had disdained those influences just a few decades ago.

We meet characters in the play who hate the power of money and fashion in the new Russia and who long for the days of government-imposed standards and government-sanctioned products. The nostalgia for a vanished communist era sometimes recalls the hit 2003 German comedy, "Good Bye Lenin!," about those in the former East Berlin missing the "good old days" of a divided city.

The writer saw a heavy influence of "Sex and the City" on young Russian women a decade ago -- the expensive shoe fetish, in particular -- but when she returned in 2011 there was a new, post-recession austerity.

"The women were wearing flats and Ugg boots -- it had all changed very quickly," she said.

Miroshnik will be heading back to Atlanta a few days after "Russian Girls" opens in New Haven to oversee the production of another play, "The Tall Girls."

"It's a little hectic to have it all happening at the same time, but I know that I am very lucky," she said.